In a digital age overflowing with content, establishing genuine thought leadership is more critical than ever for professional services firms—especially those operating in the legal sector. And yet, for years, firms have relied on instinct, legacy processes, or vague criteria to decide which content items deserve promotion and which may be quietly archived. This subjective, often haphazard approach has left firms flying blind in an arena that involves significant financial cost and plays a vital role in brand positioning, business development, and client trust.
Enter Thought Leadership Intelligence℠, a transformative new service, developed by the PM Forum and the Managing Partners’ Forum, and introduced in the recent launch webinar by founder Richard Chaplin. This innovation is poised to bring clarity, structure, and objectivity to how member firms assess, enhance, and act upon their thought leadership activities. In this article, we unpack the key takeaways from the webinar and explore why this new solution matters.
Why Thought Leadership Needs Rethinking
For decades, marketing and BD teams across professional services firms have lacked a consistent, evidence-based method to assess the quality and impact of their thought leadership. As Richard recalled in his opening remarks, even senior marketers at top-tier firms have historically been unsure how to choose which reports, articles, or insights to promote—or how to identify which content might be harming their brand. And marketers regularly complain that calculating ROI on their thought leadership activities is both difficult and frustrating.
Thought leadership, as Richard noted, is “an important growth strategy,” for leadership teams yet firms have lacked the tools to control it despite an investment of many millions of pounds. Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ changes that by introducing objectivity, automation, and transparency to what has long been an intuitive, and often inefficient, process.
Introducing Thought Leadership Intelligence℠
Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ does five things exceptionally well:
- Automating the scoring of content at scale
- Providing improvement tips tailored to each piece
- Creating open and bespoke rankings for benchmarking
- Publicising quality items to new audiences
- Calculating ROI
At its core is an automated scoring engine that can analyse any text-based content item on any website, assigning a composite score based on four criteria: 
- Depth and accuracy
- Structural Integrity and readability
- Engagement and persuasiveness
- Visual quality
Each criterion contributes to a percentage composite score that determines whether the item is above or below a firmwide quality threshold (pre-set at 70% but customisable).
More than just assigning scores, Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ also delivers AI-generated improvement tips, offering a roadmap to refine underperforming items before publication or repromotion.
From Data to Action: What the Rankings Enable
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ is its ability to roll up thousands of individual composite scores into the firmwide scores used for three types of rankings:
- Open rankings, sponsored by Williams Lea, initially of the largest (by revenue) 100 UK law firms and 50 US law firms operating in the UK
- Bespoke shared rankings – the list of selected firms is visible to each of those firms
- Bespoke private rankings – the list of selected firms is only visible to the creator
This versatility allows member firms to do more than just view their standing. It enables them to compare performance against competitors and to allocate marketing resources based on objective evidence.
Tracking overall quality and identifying content items to adjust
Simply promoting a few special reports as a firm’s ‘thought leadership’ is seldom an optimal approach as original fresh perspectives can emerge from almost any content item on a firm’s website. With an average of 7,000 content items found for each of the 150 law firms in the initial open rankings, the sheer volume of material being scored and ranked overnight is staggering – over one million items. The investment involved in creating, editing and promoting these items is also massive – estimated by PMI at over £400m or £2.7m per firm.
- Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ allows member firms to take control of that massive investment by viewing the item count in 10% intervals by score to evaluate overall quality, calculating the ROI, and viewing each of the 7,000 content items to:
- View the scores, improvement tips, target audience and keywords
- Identify items to promote to new audiences through making them public on the Platform. The largest client base for most professional services firms is other professional services firms.
- Identify items to enhance or archive on the firm’s website
- This capability makes Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ an incredibly powerful strategic tool.
Use Cases: From Editorial to Executive Strategy
The applications of Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ extend far beyond marketing. As Richard explained, it answers key questions that affect multiple departments:
- ROI tracking: By promoting high-quality items and minimising investment in weak content, member firms can optimise both the return and the investment side of the ROI equation. A tool is provided to measure and track changes to ROI.
- Content selection: With objective scoring, it becomes easier to identify content worthy of further promotion or due for quiet retirement.
- Editorial empowerment: By giving authors a private view of scores and suggested edits before publication, editors gain leverage to raise quality without confrontation.
- Leadership alignment: Over 90% of the research panel members for the Managing Partners’ Forum’s Sector Trends Tracker consider thought leadership to be an important contributor to growth, with 50% saying that it is very important.
Real-Time Scoring, Monthly Ranking
Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ offers private instant scoring and improvement suggestions for individual items, while public firmwide rankings are updated monthly. This gives member firms the flexibility to iterate continuously without waiting weeks for feedback. It also facilitates a proactive approach: improving a series of low-scoring items can materially shift a firm’s position in the next month’s ranking.
Additionally, the private scoring function allows authors and editors to test and refine content before publication, creating a continuous feedback loop that empowers better decision-making at every stage.
Visual Quality and Beyond: A Holistic Evaluation
As Illich Real, CEO of RubikLab, the scoring framework’s co-architect, explained in the Q&A, visual layout plays a meaningful role in a content item’s performance. Strong imagery and layout are rewarded, as these can be key to client perception and recall. Importantly, the scoring framework adapts weights and expectations based on content type (e.g. news vs. commentary), making it both fair and context-sensitive.
Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ also includes AI-powered content summaries, which member firms can append or even use to replace dense, unreadable content—an increasingly practical option in an attention-starved world. These summaries are charged at £5/summary + VAT.
Empowering Networks and Multi-Firm Groups
Another powerful feature is the ability to create bespoke shared rankings across a group of firms—such as members of a global network. Each member can see how it performs against peers, while a central coordinator (e.g. network HQ) can identify which need support and which can be showcased as stars. This makes Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ into a practical objective benchmarking and performance improvement tool at scale.
Transparency and Membership Value
Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ forms part of the PM Forum’s Skills Development Platform. The platform is open to non-members but access is restricted to the MBD job board, public content items and the top 50 firms in each open ranking for all periods. At no extra cost, member firms can:
- Access all firms in any open ranking and view the firmwide scores for all periods and for the last six months
- Create and manage unlimited bespoke private or shared rankings and view the associated firmwide scores for all periods and the last six months
- Filter any ranking by country or sector
- Member firms can also invest a modest £100/year/firm + VAT to add any firm with a website to a bespoke ranking that is not listed in an open ranking.
Changing the Conversation Around Thought Leadership
Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ isn’t just a toolkit. It’s a shift in mindset. For too long, firms have treated content production as a volume game, without sufficient attention to its actual quality or impact. By taking intelligent control of thought leadership, member firms can:
- Track ROI
- Reduce reputational risk
- Improve marketing effectiveness
- Increase internal alignment
- Enhance client engagement
- Build firmwide credibility
In other words, they stop flying blind.
As Richard summed it up in closing: “This allows you to take intelligent control of your investment in thought leadership activities.” And with so many firms producing thousands of content items annually, that control is long overdue.
Next Steps
Firms interested in taking advantage of Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ are encouraged to request a private walkthrough or attend an upcoming Thought Leadership Awards webinar. Whether you are aiming to improve editorial processes, align your leadership team, or benchmark your firm more strategically, Thought Leadership Intelligence℠ provides the structure and insight to do it with confidence. All that is needed is membership of PM Forum in the relevant country.
